In the traveling exhibition, ¢a$h&¢arry, artist Lee Materazzi situates the body as a site of expansion. In a collection of 250 images on view at Quint Gallery in La Jolla, California, photography intentionally blurs into the field of sculpture. This body of work is the latest installment in the artist’s varied career and features snapshots of Materazzi, her studio, and her crafted landscapes as testimony to an intuitive creative practice spanning the last five years.
The project is displayed consistently from gallery to gallery: Prints are intentionally small, roughly 4 x 5.75 inches, and hung horizontally with pins in clusters spanning the length of the space. Limbs and objects intertwine with their surroundings in these posed works, rooted in the malleability of Mazeratti’s own form and sincere commitment to exploration. Like bright Tetris pieces shimmying into position, they invite a certain witticism by the sheer nature of their proximal sporadic arrangement.
The first self-portrait created for this series utilized existing materials from the basement studio she shares with her two children. Finger Paint Balance (2019), documents Materazzi balancing several large paint jugs between her legs and allowing them to spill haphazardly onto the floor. The resulting image is a quick imprint of this feat, playful if not a little eccentric, and lays bare the practice of mark-making. What is accident versus intent? As viewers, we accept the photographs presented to us in the gallery while also bearing witness to the tangible artistic impulse they were born from.
Searching for the bodies camouflaged into their prescribed setting becomes a rewarding scavenger hunt for the viewer. A pink nub protrudes from a circular cardboard cut-out of the same color in Pink Monochrome (2022)—is it a knee, a shoulder, or perhaps an elbow? In the adjoining work Hip-Hair-Tac (2022), a baby-blue t-shirt fabric is sheared, dotted in white, and pinned to a canary yellow backdrop. Three tendrils of hair crudely poke through in the upper left while a mysterious curved appendage plays peek-a-boo in the right hand corner. Once more the viewer is led to question what they’re observing—is it the crevice between a hip and a thigh or the soft folds of a belly? A staunch adherence to manipulating perspective shrouds many of these works in illusion. Materazzi shares that, often, her process involves a childlike sensibility to crawl around the studio, explore corners, and move until something interesting happens.
As a collective assemblage, the prints are unexpected, largely jovial, and at times unnerving, as in the case of a handful of images depicting Materazzi’s underarms pinched by household binder clips. In 5x (2020), the sensation is palpable through the print and a sore tenderness permeates in its afterimage. Brook’s Version (2020), depicts the artist’s hands filling the negative space left from an imprint of two hands roughly traced in red paint. Both these bodily manipulations could allude to historical performance works from the likes of Marina Abramovic’s Rhythm series or Ana Mendieta’s Body Tracks. Yet props, color, and compositional choices wholly personalize this experience to Materazzi.
Despite overt signification, the body remains political. The artist considers its materiality through varied mediums and the employ of negative space. In Grey in the Background (2019), the artist has painted both herself and the wall the same shade of grey. She stands to the left of the frame, eyes closed, and to her right is an almost identical imprint of her figure. She remains inert and aloof. In fact, in many of these pieces, her eyes remain closed, covered in paint, or shielded by other body parts—see Blue (2019). In this way, Materazzi merely hints at her presence. Interspersed amongst the photos are small bronze castings of the artist’s nipples and tongue, preserving and glorifying them. The sculptures are silly and joyful, multiplied in abundance and rejecting undue censorship when cheekily placed next to their photographic counterpart.
For the artist, marking time via photography becomes ritualistic. The fruits of her labor are witnessed in the images she creates by herself as much as in the colorful worlds she dreams up with her kids. The show title ¢a$h&¢arry refers to her desire for clarity and accessibility with respect to art buying. Each of the 250 prints is created in an edition of fifty and costs $50. Duplicate editions can be purchased in the gallery and taken home on the spot, thus eliminating a need for obscure and intimidating gallery practices. Anyone (with fifty dollars) can become an art collector.
¢a$h&¢arry has previously exhibited on the West Coast at 1599ftd in San Francisco, Nationale in Portland, and Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco; its fourth rendition has just closed at Quint Gallery in San Diego. This unabashedly spontaneous experiment continues to be a bold and unencumbered technique of self expression. It is an unfettered playground of a life’s work in progress. Here’s to the next five years.
¢a$h&¢arry: Lee Materazzi
Quint Gallery
September 6 to October 19, 2024